Posted on 06/05/2019 10:41:04 AM PDT by rightwingintelligentsia
I beg to differ. It is up to each party, the birth mother and the adoptee to decide.
Personally, myself, I think you should at the very least, a birth mother should answer what questions her now adult child has regarding medical issues and heritage. Let Them at least hear the sound of your voice. Anything less, I regard as a crappy person.
I looked around several years ago to see if any of the services offered anonymous test results. None of them did.
That is very telling. You’re paying them good money, but they can’t just offer the results to you. They require your personal info. All the gemology stuff is just a hyped up lure. It may be somewhat accurate, but it’s definitely not the real reason behind it all
That’s how they identified the Golden State Killer. Some distant relative submitted DNA just for fun. After that the guy was arrested after decades of searching.
Interesting that the killer abruptly stopped killing immediately after the DNA technology was discovered.
You mean like the commercial where the guy and his dad thought they were Norwegian, and then it turned out after all that they were Swedish? Or was it vice versa?
That's when the whole scam jumped the shark. Or maybe before, but that's when I said "wait a minute"...
I wonder what would happen if some guy whose mom was say, a native Hawaiian married some guy named Smith, or Schmidt, and then one of her kids sent DNA in to be tested - just DNA only, no pictures, no biographical information?
What kind of answer would they get?
Oh wait the DNA outfit would still have access to an***try.com or whatever... and public records...
Which in the end makes it a pretty good scam. I wish I had thought of it.
“He described himself as a gay, satanist, ...”
Wouldn’t that be redundant?
I know someone who sent in his DNA and was contacted by a woman who was his first cousin. He sent an email to his 5 uncles asking who this person was. All his uncles got very upset with him. Nobody fessed up.
On Investigation Discovery there was a story about a woman who killed someone — her husband, I think — in a car. She was a civilian working in a government fingerprint lab. Somehow she transferred a fingerprint on file (I think Scotch tape was involved) to the car’s door handle, and framed an innocent man. Finally, it was solved. It would be so easy for nefarious to do similar with DNA.
The three largest DNA testing companies are Ancestry, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA. With these companies, you are, at least in part, the product not the customer. You can tell by looking at Ancestry advertising. They tout their reports that tell you if you need to ditch your lederhosen and get a kilt. These reports are called an admixture analysis that uses a statistical measure of the presence of certain haplogroups that are associated with ancient groups of people. To do this, they need a large database of samples. With this database, they can also perform other kinds of analysis that have a market value. In that respect, it works like Google and Facebook.
As far as I can tell, these companies do not disclose a particular test coupled with a particular name. For genealogical purposes they use a code number or alias that is known to the company and the DNA donor, but not to others. Individuals can contact other donors, and they can exchange information including a .CSV file of their DNA test. Of the three companies, my view is that Family Tree DNA has the least commercial offshoots. They are the genealogical geeks of the trade. 23 and Me are trying to market health information and prediction, and that data has the most potential for abuse because lots of companies would be willing to pay big bucks for medical information. I don’t know if they are doing anything unethical, but I watch them with a jaundiced eye. Ancestry is trying to sell subscriptions to their many genealogical services. They have only very recently started to use their DNA databases to connect members family trees with DNA results.
There are smaller DNA testing companies that provide paternity tests and similar services, some of them don’t seem to have any limits on what they do with the results. If you are trying to decide whether you should join a German or a Scottish dancing club, taking a DNA test is overkill. If you are interested in serious genealogical research, those tools are very useful, but chose carefully who you want to deal with. Catching bad guys just happens to be a positive side effect and I have a cousin who might be worried.
“Interesting that the killer abruptly stopped killing immediately after the DNA technology was discovered.”
Well, he was a cop, so he knew where that was leading.
“Well, he was a cop, so he knew where that was leading.”
Yeah, he did. Unfortunately for him his fate was sealed in the crimes he had already committed. Maybe he was so stupid he thought DNA testing wouldn’t be done on samples taken before DNA was discovered.
Didn’t catch the joke, eh?
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